Youthful transgressions be forgiven?
Alright, hands up to any reader who has never said or done anything stupid and inappropriate in his or her life.

Unless you're on a direct track to sainthood - or you're a bald-faced liar - obviously you didn't raise your hands. None of us could. Not if we were being honest.

Which brings us, as you may have suspected, to the recent hullabaloo over some insulting, and apparently booze-infested comments made about homosexuals by Saskatchewan Tory MP Tom Lukiwski in October 1991, nearly 17 years ago.

At the time, Lukiwski was at a party with a large group of, shall we say happy, Conservatives late in the third week of an intense election campaign featuring Grant Devine against NDP leader Roy Romanow and Liberal leader Linda Haverstock. Lots of really, really stupid things were said at that party - which we now know because a video of it was taken by one of the celebratory participants and said video was recently made public by Saskatchewan deputy NDP leader Pat Atkinson at a news conference in Regina.

Atkinson, appropriately scandalized - as only socialists can be - described Lukiwski's remarks as "hateful ... disturbing ... homophobic," and it wasn't long before federal NDP Leader jack Layton was demanding that Prime Minister Stephen Harper be booted out of the party.

Nor did it take the Liberals long to try to exploit something that happened 17 years ago. Liberals quickly issued a release which they called Lukiwski's "career lowlights," chief among them his being sued for libel by former Liberal Treasury Board president Reg Alcock for wrongfully accusing Alcock of giving his former campaign manager a Canadian Wheat Board job. That accusation turned out not to be true in that case, but Liberals handing out jobs to their friends - along with Tories and New Democrats too - is hardly something that is revolutionary or completely unheard of in the political process.

There is no doubt that Lukiwski's comments were crude and just plain wrong. He referred to homosexuals as "faggots with dirt on their fingernails that transmit diseases."

But it is also instructive that every news organization which carried this story - and the Globe and Mail, a selfdescribed "national" newspaper felt it worthy of the front page - made sure to report that Lukiwski was among the majority of Conservative MPs who opposed same-sex marriage, as if there is some parallel between his crass 1991 comments and those who hold the legitimate view that marriage as an institution should be retained as between a man and a woman.

For his part, Lukiwski issued an immediate, and obviously heart-felt apology - indeed, he issued several apologies - and, much to his credit, made no excuses for his piggish behaviour 17 years ago.

He said he was "ashamed" of the comments and "If I could take those comments back I would ...They do not reflect the type of person that I am."

For Harper, that's the end of it. For many Liberals and New Democrats - many of whom should look in the mirror at their own history - an apology, even one that is meant, just won't do, particularly if they can use an issue to smear Conservatives in general, not just Lukiwski in particular, by suggesting that Conservative concerns about marriage and other issues are based on hate rather than a different sense of social morality.

As a journalist during the controversial years in the 1970s and 1980s when the homosexual community was actively tossing around its' political muscle, I can tell you that I used some language to describe their efforts that I would not use now.

That's because this issue, like all issues, evolve. What was common 17 years ago and part of every day speech, is no longer widely acceptable. But that does not mean, not for a second, that there is only one acceptable view on this and other issues of social significance. It is one thing to apologize for being crass and ugly in your comments. It's quite another thing to disavow your core beliefs on the basis that these beliefs are not universally held.

And for those who can't find it in their hearts to forgive Lukiwski for his youthful transgressions, they should be reminded that it was the late great Mahatma Gandhi who said, "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

Amen to that.